Ah, yes. Those were the days. It was a simpler time. Back when developers only really had to worry about one machine — the PS2. Everyone had one, and all the devs figured out how to develop games on that platform. Things were competitive, but straight forward and streamlined, even. But now, now is hard. Everything is complex! Says Koei president Kenji Matsubara:

In the PlayStation days, the platform was only one, but the competition was so high. For PLAYSTATION 3, we have to spend huge resources. In the PlayStation 2 days, we could just focus on one platform, but these days, we have to spend resources on handhelds, popular consoles like the Wii, and high-performance consoles like the Xbox 360 and PS3. It means that we have to spend too much money and many resources. That's a challenge for us.